Without Options (28 page)

Toni and Franz waited back along the edge of the small park off of Leipziger Strasse at the edge of Berlin’s Mitte and Kreuzberg areas. She thought it a strange location for a meet to drop off one million Euros, and even worse for a place to kill a man instead of paying out the money for a hit. But that’s where the instructions had led them. In fact, after the meeting with the Polizei homicide detective earlier in the day, she should’ve known the location was wrong. Most of the other killings had been in remote industrial areas on the east side of the river. Except for the Turk and the Polish man recently. Maybe they’d changed their pattern.

Now it was an hour after the midnight meet time. She’d been sent on a wild goose chase. Damn it. Jake had done this to her, she was sure. Even though she wasn’t certain how he could have changed the location. Her mind reeled back to the server in Frankfurt. Somehow Jake had gotten into that system and sent the location. He was capable, there was no doubt about that. But why would he do it? As her eyes gazed out into the darkness, she realized why. He wanted to keep anyone else from dying or getting involved. Jake knew others would take advantage of the situation, just as he was planning to do, and could either get in his way or get killed.

“What happened?” Franz asked Toni, his tone subdued and his throat horse from coughing and smoking.

“Jake happened.” She explained her theory to Franz. How she figured Jake had changed the meeting location.

He shook his head. “Sounds like something Jake would do. So, where is he really at this moment?”

That was Toni’s problem. If she had to guess, Jake was in trouble. More trouble than even he knew. “I don’t know. Could you call your Polizei friend and see what he knows?”

Franz didn’t answer. He simply flipped open his cell phone, punched a speed dial and waited. He talked for a moment in German and shook his head as he closed the phone. “Let’s go. There’s been a shooting east of the river.” He relayed the initial directions and Toni sped off.

“Did they say who was shot?” she asked, her mind immediately focusing on Jake.

Franz lit another cigarette and said through the side of his mouth, “He had no identification.”

My God, she thought. Could it be Jake?

“They think it was a Russian.”

“How?”

“Based on his watch and dental work.”

Franz continued to direct Toni toward the shooting site. With the light traffic at that time of night, it still took them more than twenty minutes to reach the site of the shooting. The Polizei had already set up lights and crime scene tape, keeping back the media and gawkers. Two Polizei boats cruised out in the river as if searching for more bodies. The Polizei homicide investigator Toni had met that afternoon, Herr Vogler, strolled up to the passenger side of her car and Franz opened the window for him.

“You got one of those for me?” Herr Vogler asked Franz in German, who flipped the pack for the Polizei man and he started to grab a cigarette but stopped. Instead, he simply pulled a piece of gum from his pocket and shoved it into his mouth. “Trying to stop,” he explained.

“Anything interesting since we talked?” Franz asked.

“Glass by the body. Looks like the man was shot through his car window. Probably used it as a shield. But not good enough to stop a bullet.”

“What caliber?” Toni asked, sticking with German.

“Forty cal,” Vogler said, pointing back toward the river. “Same as Baden-Baden. Same as Alexanderplatz. Found the spent casings over there. Looks like the shooter was standing there and then hit the ground and shot some more. But there’s no blood, so it doesn’t appear he was hit. Our victim was hit once in the stomach and again in the leg. The femoral artery. He didn’t have a chance.”

“Who owns the car?” Toni asked.

“It was reported stolen from a restaurant a few weeks ago,” the Berlin Polizei man said.

Damn it. Jake was here and she should have been as well. How would she find him now?

“How did you get here so fast?” Franz asked.

The Polizei man smiled and took in a deep breath, then continued his assault on the gum. “Someone across the river heard the shots. Called it in.”

“Are the boats searching for a gun?” Toni asked.

Herr Vogler hesitated and stooped lower to gaze directly at her. “Yes. There was no gun found at the body. But we know the dead man shot. He has residue on his right hand and there are spent nine millimeter casings near him. So, either the other shooter took the man’s gun after he shot him, or he threw the gun into the river.”

None of this helped Toni, except the revelation that the second man had probably not been shot, since there was no blood. But this German Polizei man seemed to know more than he was willing to tell them. It was his expression of superiority that bothered Toni. Where would they go from here? Jake must have kept the Russian alive long enough to get some information.

“What are you thinking, Frau Contardo?” Vogler asked in perfect English. “Let me guess. You know who did this. It’s the same man from Baden-Baden and Alexanderplatz. A man you know all too well.”

“That man wouldn’t have missed so poorly,” she said.

Franz nodded agreement. “She’s right.”

Herr Vogler considered that for a moment. He took the time to add another piece of gum to his mouth. “Perhaps. But maybe this man wanted to know a little more from the dead man. The man was down and bleeding and the shooter could have simply popped a round into the man’s head and finished him off. But he didn’t. No. We have a couple foot prints near the body. The shooter wanted information.”

Crap. This guy was good, Toni thought. She’d considered that precise scenario. It’s something Jake would do.

Vogler continued, “I would guess your friend got what he came for.”

“A name,” Franz said. “This dead man’s boss.”

“Exactly.”

Toni started the car and said, “It looks like your case is nearly solved.”

The Polizei man said, “You think so?”

“Yes. When your men find the gun in the river, I’m sure ballistics will match at least one of the killings over the past couple months.”

“Maybe,” Vogler said. “But then we still need to wrap up motive and consider if the killer was hired. And if so, who hired him?”

She put the car in reverse and looked over her shoulder to pull back. “If I know our friend, you’ll have that by morning.”

The Polizei man kept his hands on the door, his eyes on Franz. “You take care, my friend.”

Franz pulled out a cigarette for his old friend, lit it, and tried to hand it to Vogler.

“Thanks. But I better stick with the gum.”

“That will just kill you a little slower,” Franz said.

“Not before the job.” Vogler pulled his hand away and tapped the roof.

Toni backed away, stopped, and did a U-Turn, heading back toward the center of Berlin. There had to be some way to find Jake. And it would come to her soon.

32

A chill came back to Jake as he’d waited for Alexandra to come around from the opposite side of the Spree River, where she’d watched Jake and the Russian shoot at each other. She’d pulled up just long enough for Jake to jump in before hurrying away from the meeting site.

From the riverfront, Alexandra drove around to the east, picking up one of the outer ring roads before asking Jake what had happened.

“About what you’d expect,” Jake said. “As I thought, there was never any money put up for a bounty. It was all a big ruse to kill off the old guard.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Your Stasi friend Bernard Hartmann isn’t too keen on the new SVR or their tactics.” Jake had an idea what motivated them, but would reserve judgment until he knew for sure.

“First of all, that Stasi bastard is not my friend. And second, he should talk. He killed his own people for minor indiscretions during the Cold War.”

Jake knew all of this. “I was kidding, Alexandra. The Stasi kept that Wall up at least a decade longer than they needed. Well, it was never needed.”

“I’m sorry. Stasi agents killed two of my cousins who tried to cross over to the west in the seventies.”

“Were you even born in the seventies?”

“Very funny.” She hesitated and said, “I was a young girl. You remember my school girl uniform. Where next?”

Jake hadn’t told her that he’d gotten a name and location from the Russian. “Let’s go get the real mastermind behind this whole crazy plot.”

She glanced at him. “The Russian told you something?”

“Yeah.”

“How can you be sure he wasn’t lying?”

“He was highly motivated,” Jake remarked. “And even if he was lying, you have something better to do tonight?”

Smiling, she said, “I could think of something.”

“I meant with our clothes on.”

“Then no.”

He gave her the location and she turned off the ring road and headed west.

“That’s not a great neighborhood,” Alexandra said. “I would have expected. . .well, I don’t know what I thought.”

“Remember, this is the SVR. Or at least a rogue faction of the SVR.”

“Have you heard of this person?”

How could Jake answer that? After a long internal deliberation, he finally said, “Yeah, but we’ve never met.” He explained how he knew the man’s older brother. How the former Russian colonel had died right in front of Jake during a mission. But he didn’t go into any detail.

“Did you kill him?”

“No. He was shot by another Agency officer during an Op. I liked Yuri Pushkin. He could drink more than anyone I’ve ever met. But I understand he did try to have me killed more than once.”

“Well, there’s that. And you still liked the man. You are strange, Jake Adams. What do you know of his brother?”

“Last I heard he was a major in the Russian Army, but I heard he was attached to the GRU. That was years ago, though. I don’t know when he switched to the SVR.”

“This is tough to ask, Jake.” She turned and looked at him seriously before concentrating again on her driving. “Does he blame you for his brother’s death?”

“I don’t know.” It was the truth. After Jake’s action on that mission, he never heard what happened to those left behind, including the disposition of Colonel Yuri Pushkin. “It depends on how the Russians briefed the event. I’m sure they made me out to be the bad guy, with Yuri a state hero. So maybe his brother Viktor blames me. But I don’t know.” Pushkin’s name had not even come up on his radar in the past two months as Jake lay in bed and wondered who had killed Anna.

“Sounds like a good motive.”

That’s what Jake thought from the moment Viktor’s name came out of the mouth of the dying Russian. Jake reached behind him to his backpack, retrieving a few more full magazines to replace some of the firepower he’d thrown into the river. Then he made sure all of his magazines were full. Now he had two identical Beretta PX4 Storms.

“I thought I saw you throw a perfectly good gun into the river,” Alexandra said.

“It was the Glock I got from Franz in Austria. Remind me to buy him a new one.”

“All right. I hate to see Jake Adams abusing one of his children. We’re almost there. How do you want to play this?”

Good question. “I’m guessing the guy already knows I’m coming. Otherwise his man would have called him, saying I was dead. In fact, I’m thinking he bet on his man getting killed, but not before he gave up his location.”

Alexandra looked shocked. “But why?”

“Because he wants to confront me himself.”

“You think he thought his man would fail?”

“Yeah. I mean, if he’d succeeded he could live with that. He loses a good killer, but then he gets to set me up as well, and take me on his turf.”

“He’s that calculating?”

“You can bet on it.”

“But then he knows we’re coming.”

“Pull over.”

She did as he said, pulling her car to the curb in a deserted industrial area of Berlin’s eastern area. Turning off the engine, she stared at Jake with concern.

He found his cell phone in the backpack and put the battery back into it, activating the GPS.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“Just in case I fail.”

“Let me call my people,” she pled.

He shook his head. “This man killed Anna to get to me. One of the shooters got away that day. I was down and out. He could have simply walked up to me and put a bullet in my head. It’s always bothered me that I survived that shooting.”

“That’s natural.”

“There was nothing natural about Anna’s death.”

“I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t mean that. I meant you feeling guilty for surviving.”

“I know. But I was vulnerable in the hospital for nearly two months. An easy target. Why not just kill me then?” That had also bothered Jake for the past few weeks.

She simply shrugged.

“Viktor Pushkin was setting this whole thing up, running the chess board like a grand master playing with his grandchild. I knew someone was doing this when I saw the list of people on the hit list. Everyone on that list had some contact with me over the years—either as an adversary or a confederate. I assumed someone was just picking off former agents or government intelligence officers. But that list would have included some people that I had never worked with. This list was quite specific. My only problem was trying to link who else would know I’d worked with these people, and who would have a motive to kill me. Many on the list fit that description. So, I thought that perhaps someone on that list had actually added their name to throw me off.”

“Ah. That’s why you went to see the Russian in Baden-Baden and the Stasi officer here in Berlin.”

“Right.”

“But neither man could’ve been the one who was trying to kill you.”

“No. Vladimir Volkov was killed right in front of me. And I don’t think Bernard Hartmann is involved. He’s just waiting to die himself.”

“Let me call in our people,” she reiterated. “We can handle this.”

“I don’t think so. He’s with SVR. Your people will just pick him up and put him on a plane back to Moscow. He has diplomatic immunity. Then he simply regroups and comes after me again.”

“Only if the SVR has sanctioned his actions.”